Teaching Testing with Modern Technology Stacks in Undergraduate Software Engineering Courses

Published in ITiCSE '21, 2021

https://doi.org/10.1145/3430665.3456352

Citation: Scott P. Chow, Tanay Komarlu, and Phillip T. Conrad. 2021. Teaching Testing with Modern Technology Stacks in Undergraduate Software Engineering Courses. In 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1 (ITiCSE 2021), June 26–July 1, 2021, Virtual Event, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3430665.3456352

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Abstract

Students’ experience with software testing in undergraduate computing courses is often relatively shallow, as compared to the importance of the topic. This experience report describes introducing industrial-strength testing into CMPSC 156, an upper division course in software engineering at UC Santa Barbara. We describe our efforts to modify our software engineering course to introduce rigorous test-coverage requirements into full-stack web development projects, requirements similar to those the authors had experienced in a professional software development setting. We present student feedback on the course and coverage metrics for the projects. We reflect on what about these changes worked (or didn’t), and provide suggestions for other instructors that would like to give their students a deeper experience with software testing in their software engineering courses.